Lukas Moodysson at the NFT

After the warm compassion of Show Me Love and Together, Lukas Moodysson has tackled much darker subject matter with Lilya 4-Ever. The Swedish film director spoke to Danny Leigh about human trafficking, God and the importance of playing with Lego

Danny Leigh: I am very pleased to introduce Lukas Moodysson and Oksana Akinshina.

[Applause]

I am sure everyone who has seen Lukas's new film Lilya 4-Ever has lots of questions that they want to ask. I know I do. But I would like to start by broadening things out and talking about your career in general. You originally started out as a poet and a writer when you were a frighteningly young age. You then took a sideways step into film. Why did you choose film to be your medium, having been a published poet at the age of 17?

Lukas Moodysson: I remember being very bored with my life. I wanted to change everything. I did not know exactly where to go but I knew I had to do something else. I wanted to be a lawyer, I wanted to be a cook in a restaurant or I wanted to be a film director. I was lucky enough to be accepted at a film school, although I had applied for other schools. It was a thing that came out of being bored and wanting to change everything completely. It wasn't until a bit later that I discovered that film was the thing that I really wanted to do.

DL: So if things had turned out differently, you could have been a chef.

LM: No, I wouldn't be a chef now. I would have only done it for one or two years.

DL: Were there any film-makers that particularly inspired you to be a film director or was it just a case of wanting to do something with your life?

LM: No, no directors inspired me. I just wanted to do something else at the time but, looking back now, I can see that maybe I wanted to broaden my horizons, to reach a wider audience and to take a bigger place in the world. I wanted to be more interested in the rest of the world and not only myself. Poetry for me was very self-centred. It is not necessarily self-centred but for me it was.

DL: Do you still write poetry for pleasure?

LM: I accidentally write poetry sometimes. I did actually publish a book of poetry this year. I never plan to write poetry. I plan to make films. But there are some things that I cannot put in my films. Some things cannot be put anywhere else but in poetry.

DL: Your first feature was Show Me Love. It was obviously very well received in Sweden and elsewhere, not least Britain. I think one of the reasons that people responded to it so well was because here was this guy in his mid- to late-20s making his first feature but it wasn't about a guy in his mid- to late-20s. Instead you made a film about two 16-year-old girls. It wasn't full of coffee shops, awful romances and bad American jokes. Is that something that was deliberate, in terms of standing out from the herd, or was it something that developed organically?

LM: I never thought about coffee shops or bad American jokes. I felt that, if I was going to make a movie that went back to my own teenage time then I would have to do it as soon as possible before I was too old. At the moment I am thinking about making another movie about 16- and 17-year-olds. But I am not sure if I can do it in the long run because maybe the distance will become too much. So I have to do it as soon as possible. The film started out as something completely different because there had been a turning point in my life. I had my first child and then started writing Show Me Love. I changed in many ways to become a person who was interested in the world and not just myself. When you have a child, you are no longer the centre of the universe. It made me change my aesthetic principles. Before that, I was more interested in writing scripts about the most bizarre aspects of life. They were very bloody and violent, with lots of strange things happening. The Show Me Love script started out like that. It started with these two sisters having a crazy mass murdering neighbour and so on. But it then suddenly became much more interesting for me to listen to them talking with each other in their rooms, talking about their dreams and what they wanted to do in life.

DL: How much of the film was drawn from your experience? On the face of it, it doesn't seem to be autobiographical.

LM: No, it's not autobiographical at all. Many of the feelings and emotions come very close to what I have felt myself. But the story is not about my life. I am not a girl.

[Laughter]

DL: At the same time, it is recognisable for anyone who grew up in the suburbs.

LM: Well, it's not really about the suburbs. It's set way out in the countryside, far away from the big city. It's a very small town.

DL: Does that mirror your own upbringing?

LM: I grew up in the suburbs, rather than the countryside. I grew up where it was quite easy to go to a rather big city. But there was still isolation there because you would always go to the city if you could. I think for many of us distance is psychological rather than geographical.

DL: It must have been incredibly flattering when Bergman called you a young master and referred to the film as a masterpiece. That must have been very flattering but was it also intimidating?

LM: In what way would it have been intimidating?

DL: In the sense that here is one of the greatest film-makers talking about a film you have made at such a young age. Masterpiece is a strong phrase to use.

LM: Perhaps not. I didn't think it was a masterpiece when I saw the clip of it just now. I was a bit disappointed. I hadn't seen it in a long time. I think I am part of a generation where I don't really have to measure myself with Bergman. I don't have to love him or hate him. I can be more neutral towards him. For a long time in Sweden, film-makers felt the need to distance themselves from Bergman or be as close as possible to him. But I haven't really thought about him a lot.

DL: What's your relationship like with the Swedish film industry? It's been a bit up and down since you made Show Me Love, hasn't it?

LM: I am in the position now where I can make films so I can't really complain at all. But I think that it's healthy for me and maybe also for the Swedish film industry if I stay away a little bit. I don't think it's healthy to be too close to your colleagues and other people that make films. I have small circle, a kind of family, of people that I work with in the film business. But apart from that I don't really hang out with other Swedish actors or directors.

DL: What exactly happened at the Swedish film awards after Show Me Love? In Britain we only really got secondhand accounts of what seems to have been a bit of a controversy. There was an incident on stage, wasn't there?

LM: Do you want me to show you? I felt that, if you had the opportunity to be on stage and talk to millions of Swedish people then you should say something important. So I tried to say something important but, looking back, I am not sure if it was the most important thing to say. I made a small speech to say that I didn't think that the Royal Opera was the proper place for a film awards ceremony because I feel that film is a much more democratic art form than opera. I also said that you shouldn't eat meat.

[Laughter]

And I said that you shouldn't drive too fast because people can get killed. And I talked about taxes. And then I talked about being nice to children and some other things.

DL: How long did the speech take? You were covering a lot of ground there.

LM: Yes. That was one of the reasons that they were upset.

[Laughter]

People started booing so I started making bad gestures towards the audience because I thought that they were being rude. I think that the TV audience at home thought I was making these gestures at them. But I wasn't. I was just pointing my finger towards the people who were booing me. This developed into a big misunderstanding. I think I did the right thing even if I did not talk about the most important things. I think you have to talk about important things, not just thank your mother.

[Applause]

I am a bit scared that I will be in the same situation again, accepting an award. It takes a lot of courage to do that and I am not sure if I have that courage. If I, for example, received an Oscar one day I am not sure if I would have the courage to stand there and talk about the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay or Mr Bush. I am not sure if I am courageous enough because it would create a lot of trouble for myself.

DL: Lilya 4-Ever is eligible for an Oscar. It has been nominated, hasn't it?

LM: No, it hasn't been nominated. It is the Swedish representative. Every country has a representative. I am not sure if it will be nominated. I am not sure if it will be nominated and I am a bit afraid of that.

DL: You don't strike me as the kind of film-maker for whom gongs and trinkets are very relevant.

LM: I think we all have those sides to us that really like that aspect but I try not to care. But I do care. I tell myself that it's not important but a stupid person inside me likes those things.

DL: You still want the love?

LM: I am not sure if it is love. I want the power.

[Laughter]

DL: Together was another film that did astonishingly well, particularly here. Were you wary when you started making the film that the era of the 70s has so much cultural baggage to it? There are lots of films set in that era that treat it like a joke. Was that something that put you off the subject matter?

LM: I wasn't really aware that there were lots of films about the 70s when we started to plan this film. It felt like a totally new thing in Sweden because I don't think there had been many films made about the 70s. I only really felt that I was making Swedish films for a Swedish audience with Show Me Love and Together. It's different with Lilya 4-Ever because it is Russian. The subject is much more international. I didn't really think that it was a film that would be shown outside Sweden. I could have suspected it but I didn't really think about it. I partly intended to make a film about the 70s but, more importantly, I intended to make a film that was an allegory of human togetherness. I was interested in the conflicts of being close together - the problems and the wonderful things. I tried to create this collective as a metaphor for the whole world. Looking back at the film I sometimes feel like that idea was a little lost. The reactions of audiences in Sweden and other places showed me that people had focused more on the 70s comedy angle rather than the allegorical side.

DL: People also may have missed the universal element. Didn't people in Sweden think that you were attacking your parents' generation and the spirit of the late 60s and early 70s?

LM: Not really, no. It divided critics and it divided audiences. It was intended as a celebration of many of the things of the 70s, certainly many of the ideas of political radicalism, along with many of the questions that were asked at the time. I also wanted to criticise a little. But the foundation of the film was a celebration of people who wanted to change their lives and investigate the possibility of alternative lifestyles.

DL: Although the film seemed quite critical of the communal lifestyle, do you miss that? These days it seems to have gone out of the window.

LM: I am not sure about that because I think we are living in a very political time at the moment. Of course the details are different but I think we are living in a time where issues like solidarity and justice are being talked about again.

DL: But the specific situation whereby people set up communes does not seem to be prevalent any more. Would you like to see that making a comeback?

LM: I am not sure if that is true because there are a lot of people who don't have a place to live at the moment. I think that there are quite a few communes at the moment. I am not sure about the situation in London, however. Maybe they are more accidental communes than ideological communes.

DL: I think what I am getting at is the sense of nostalgia there was for the 70s because I think it was a much more optimistic era.

LM: It was also a very angry era, certainly a very political era. But perhaps it was more optimistic, yes. But I am not sure.

DL: I believe that there is a US remake in the offing, is there not?

LM: A producer has bought the option to make a version of it. I think that could be okay. I think it would be interesting to see how a film like this will be handled like that in America, for sociological reasons if nothing else. I think it will be interesting.

DL: There must be a lot of Californian children out there who will have grown up in similar situations. But it is quite ironic to think of Hollywood taking on the Together house.

LM: That is partly what I like about the idea. In general I think that remakes are a symptom of cultural imperialism and that may be the case this time too. But I kind of enjoy the idea.

DL: One thing that seems to connect Show Me Love, Together and Lilya 4-Ever is that they are all told from a child's point of view. What is it that draws you to this perspective and gives you the best angle on the story?

LM: I think children and teenagers are sometimes very vulnerable. They are certainly very defenceless. This means that what happens in the world leaves scars on them in more evident ways than on grownups. Grownups have a greater ability to defend themselves. There is also something that makes me interested in exploring what happens when you are a child and I am not sure exactly why.

DL: My memory of being a child is being very suspicious of adults. Do you feel like that now?

LM: Yes, a bit.

DL: Can I ask why?

LM: I like to make movies rather than analyse myself. I think it's quite nice to become older because you become smarter and more intelligent. You start to know things about the world. On the other hand, I think that when you grow up you do lose some things in life. You lose a little bit of courage and you lose a bit of fantasy and imagination. You lose a wide-open way of looking at the world in a mysterious way. I think some grownups have lost too much and gained too little through growing up. I think it is very important not to forget the person you were when you were eight or 15. You should remember what kind of music you listened to and the kind of feelings you had when you were a child. That person is still part of you. I think that's very important. I think that the world would be a better place if we were all in better contact with our inner children.

DL: How does one do that then?

LM: It's difficult. I think you have to practise your imagination and remember what it was like. You should not become too nostalgic though because you can't live in the past. I have two children and I think it's important to play with them. It's important to meet them on their level and play with Lego a lot.

[Laughter]

It's terrible to see that they build much better things than I do because their brains are much more filled with strange worlds than mine. I build things that don't break and are symmetrical. They build crazy castles and spaceships - much more interesting things than mine. That would be a serious suggestion, then. Lego.

DL: Shortly before I saw Lilya 4-Ever I saw some comments from you saying that you wanted to make a film about God's benevolence. Watching the film, it seems that you made quite a leap from there. Do you think God's benevolence is still present in the film?

LM: Yes, I do. The story of the film came very suddenly to me. It was like someone had whispered in my ear and said, "This is the film that you are going to make and you cannot do anything else." It was a surprise to me because I was planning to make a completely different film. Well, not a completely different film, but not a film that dealt with prostitution and was set in Eastern Europe. At the start it was a more religious film. It dealt with Jesus walking around in the world and walking next to Lilya. He was physically one of the characters in the film. But I couldn't really write that part, however. It struck me yesterday that maybe Volodya throughout the whole film became a metaphor for Jesus. I had never thought of it like before but I came up with it yesterday. Maybe that's how Jesus transcended into this little abused boy who stands up for this girl. I am not sure if that is how it worked subconsciously for me but I like the idea of Jesus as a little boy who is very kind and tries to do everything he can to save this girl.

DL: How much practical research into trafficking and prostitution in Eastern Europe?

LM: It feels like I am doing that research now. When we made the film, we received so many letters from organisations who were touched by the film and wanted to open a discussion because they were working with similar issues. Everyone - from someone at an orphanage in Chile to the Swedish foreign minister - got in touch. I am now learning a lot about trafficking and prostitution but when I started to write the script I knew exactly what I wanted to write. It was thrown into my head. Somewhere in the back of my mind I had heard about lots of things that had happened in Sweden like this. There was a girl in Malmo, which is where I am from, who threw herself off a bridge after she escaped from being locked up in an apartment in circumstances not completely dissimilar to those of Lilya. It is not a film about her but it is partly inspired by her. In the back of my mind I did have a lot of things that I had heard from people and read about.

DL: I guess with Lilya, the casting was always going to be crucial. Could you talk about the casting process at all? Oksana's performance is astonishing but how closely could you predict that?

LM: I think you have to have a very open mind when you are casting because otherwise you won't find the best actors. If you think that you want someone with dark hair, for example, or someone who has this kind of personality and so on you miss out on people that could be great. You should not have too many ideas about the person you are looking for. I was quite surprised when I found Oksana. She wasn't exactly what I had imagined. She is better than I imagined but different, somehow. I am not sure in what way, however.

DL: How much professional experience had Oksana had?

LM: She had been in one film before Lilya 4-Ever, in which she played one of the major characters. So she is not completely new to this at all. It wasn't based on that film that we decided that she was the right actor. She is very good in that film but she plays a rather cold person, not showing the emotions that she does in Lilya 4-Ever. I think improvisation is very important for casting. You can set up very interesting situations by just putting people at a table and getting them to argue about why they are not allowed to go out or why they have to eat sausage. Usually, I will do something like an argument between a mother and child about why the child hasn't done here homework or something.

DL: Is there much dialogue that you insist on when you are scripting? Or do you just set up scenarios and let the actors do their thing?

LM: No, that was the audition part of things. I then write completely detailed scripts. I am sometimes very afraid to walk away from the script but sometimes I have the courage to improvise scenes while we are filming. But there is a detailed script to start with.

DL: You very deliberately made the fictional location in the film non-specific. Were you ever tempted to admit that you were in Estonia, where it was filmed?

LM: At the beginning, we said that we were in Estonia. But after a while, it felt like the story didn't just take place in Estonia. It takes place all over the world. It takes place in Japan and many other places. We made the film in Estonia for practical reasons. We found good collaborators and people to work with there. For technical reasons, it was a good choice to work in Estonia. But it is maybe not the first country that I would think about if we were talking about trafficking.

DL: How good is your Russian?

LM: I can say things like "chicken" and "meat", for some reason. I can say many words that mean something like "good" or "fantastic" or "excellent" or "very good" or "wonderful" or "perfect". Because that is what I usually say after a scene. But I don't speak Russian.

DL: How difficult was it for you to keep track of the emotions of what was going on? In many cases you weren't going to know the intonations of the dialogue because it's not your first language.

LM: I didn't know the exact words, no. I had to trust the translation of the script and I had to trust the actors. I had to trust the people around me. But when it came to the acting and emotions, it wasn't that difficult. The first day was very difficult because I did not know what I was doing at all. I was thinking that it was completely insane because I did not understand a word of what they were saying. The first scene didn't work at all. It was very stiff. I was laughing at how stupid it was to be in Estonia with Russian actors. So I told them not to follow the script and instead to improvise. And I started laughing even more because it became even more absurd because I did not know what they were talking about at all. But after this, it turned out OK. When I really started listening to what they were saying it wasn't that difficult to judge if they were present and saying what they were saying in a way where it felt like they really meant it, not just acting. Directing for me is a question of listening and deciding if I believe what they are saying. It is much more about listening rather than looking. I am sometimes quite surprised afterwards when I see the takes because I haven't really looked at their faces; I have just listened to what they were saying.

DL: How emotionally difficult for you was it to make the film? It's very difficult to watch a lot of the time.

LM: It was difficult to make because everyone was getting ill and having different problems. I was really ill at one point so I was directing from a bed for one week. I was just opening my eyes when someone said, "Action!" We had problems with actors who didn't have driver's licenses who crashed the cars that they were supposed to drive in a certain scene, who came to the set drunk and who didn't speak Russian. We cast one person who we thought spoke Russian but who we discovered only spoke Estonian when she arrived on set. But everyone who is in the finished film was very good in every way. It was like sitting on a rollercoaster and saying, "OK, I can't control this. I just have to lean back and see what happens." And that was very interesting for the film. We were really going somewhere.

DL: How closely did you have to work with Oksana? Even if it wasn't that problematic for you, I imagine it must have been very difficult for her.

LM: I didn't say it wasn't problematic for me. You couldn't really sit around thinking about emotional things when people were crashing cars. We worked very closely together and talked about everything. We made deals about what to do and what not to do. It was important for me to protect Oksana as a person and Lilya as a person, even if she is fictional. It was important that we made a film that didn't exploit or expose Lilya or Oksana. I tried to, both visually and with the story, to stay as close to Lilya as possible. That's why you see that shot with all those men on top of her but you don't see her face because that's what she sees. It was important that we didn't focus on her but instead we focused on what she saw. In many of those scenes, Oksana wasn't even present. In many scenes, it was the photographer of the film who was lying underneath.

[Laughter]

He is a very brave, big man but, after a few scenes, he said that he wasn't sure if he could do any more of the scenes because it was so difficult because these men were so close to him and he could feel their breath on him. It became very physical. It's quite funny but it is also terrible to think about. One time I had to do it because he couldn't do it any more. We were fully dressed and we weren't raped but it still felt like an enormously awkward situation. It made you realise that we had experienced 0.1% of what the Lilyas of this world in reality experience everyday, today, tomorrow and yesterday. That was difficult.

DL: Were you ever tempted to soften the story line to give a more explicit sense of hope? You have to look for the hope in the film.

LM: But we have to look for hope in life too. For me, the film is an attempt to make an accurate portrayal of some parts of the world. Life can be wonderful but it also can be like hell. I had something in the back of my head from a young Chilean man who lives in Sweden. I don't know this person but I read about him. His father was tortured to death in a prison during Pinochet's time. This man wrote a book about his father. He goes into real detail about the way his father was tortured. It was enormously cruel. They broke all the bones in his body before he died. They tried to keep him alive as long as possible. This man was asked how he could write these things. And he said that his father had to experience it, whereas he only had to write it. That is something I had in the back of my head. This film was to do with responsibility and guilt. I feel responsible for things that happen in the world and I think we all should. I have tried to take my responsibility for it by making this film. That was one reason why I didn't want to soften it. We showed the film last week to 25 or 30 people from Eastern Europe, mainly women, who are working with trafficking and prostitution in their countries. I was quite happy to hear that they thought the film was accurate. One of them said that the film could have been much darker and much worse. The reality that they see is much worse. For example, the mother could have not only betrayed her child by leaving but she could also have sold her for £10. That is what happens in the world today.

DL: Do you think too much European cinema is too apolitical and prettified? Would you like your work to wake up other directors? Would you like to think that you could kickstart a new wave of political cinema?

LM: I think that's a journalistic question. I haven't really thought about it like that. I would like to see more political films but I also think that there are some political films out there. But it is also OK to make films that are entertaining. People have difficult lives and need to be entertained. I don't think that comedy is bad but I think more people should take more political responsibility. I would like people to have political opinions in their films. I would like them just to have opinions in their film. I would even like to see rightwing Nazi films because I think it is good if people raise their voices and say what they mean. I think it would be interesting to see Nazi film-makers make films today. I am not sure if I would like to be in any way associated with one and I am not sure if it would be good if it was state-funded but I think people must speak up.

DL: The conventional wisdom is that the older you get the less political you get. The opposite applies to you.

LM: I think so, yes. But there is also a conflict within me over whether I should go in this direction or that direction. I sometimes feel like I have big responsibility. There is a conflict between being a human being who is responsible for things that happen in the world and being an artist who is mainly responsible for his art.

DL: Lilya and Volodya are very three-dimensional characters. But I imagine the temptation when you are writing is to make her a typical exploited Eastern European girl and not give her three dimensions. How hard was it to pull that off?

LM: I always try to make my characters as real as possible. I don't know if I succeed but that is what I try to do.